As Swann smoked his pipe and relived his past, Sergeant John Parker, after briefing Constable Evans about the little job over the road, put on his bowler hat and a lightweight cape, for it had begun to drizzle, and left the police station by a concealed side entrance to make his way up Great William Street and then down the tow-path of the canal to the bustling canal basin where Cox’s Timber Yard was, as ever, a hive of activity. He then made his way along the pathway by the edge of the river to the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre where he’d planned to meet his wife, Ann, in The Shakespeare Rooms for tea.

John Parker had met Ann Browning soon after he found lodgings in her widowed mother’s large old house in Old Town in the summer of 1879, where he was given a first floor room that overlooked Holy Trinity Church, a view that gave the young policeman some serenity in an increasingly hectic and violent life.

And it had been in the churchyard of Holy Trinity that John Parker had first seen Ann as she placed flowers on a small memorial to her father, Major Marvis Browning, who had died earlier that year at the Battle of Kambula in the last weeks of the Zulu Wars.

Parker didn’t know she was the daughter of his landlady – although he’d heard she had a daughter – no, all he could see was a young woman who could be no more than twenty, with dark auburn hair that glowed healthily in the dying sunlight of a late summer’s day, a body that was graceful beneath her full black dress, and a face of such beauty and radiance that when she turned to look at him his heart turned somersaults to see such a fine mouth and nose and blue eyes that burned deep into his soul. Detective Sergeant John Parker, like his boss all those years before in India, suddenly, and completely fell head over heels in love.

Ann Browning smiled.

” I think you must be our new lodger, sir?”

” And I should have known, by your beauty alone, dear lady, that you are your mother’s daughter.”

” I am not at all sure, sir, that you should be talking to me like that in a churchyard?”

” I’m sure God looks kindly upon a man in love?”